From The Wirecutter: The best consumer-grade SSD (for most people)

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a list of the best technology products to buy. Read the full article at TheWirecutter.com.

If I were buying an SSD to replace a mechanical hard drive or an SSD that's running out of room, I'd get the 500GB Samsung 850 EVO. It has one of the best combinations of price, performance, and capacity of any drive you can get, plus easy-to-use software and a long warranty, and it comes from a company that makes excellent SSDs (and all their components).

The Samsung 850 EVO comes in 2.5-inch SATA form factor (shown) as well as mSATA and M.2.

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Who’s this for?

If your computer boots from a mechanical hard drive, that hard drive is holding you back, because the rest of the computer has to wait around for information to be read from or written to the drive. Replacing your boot drive with an SSD is one of the easiest ways to make an older computer feel newer and faster. If you've never used one before, you'll be amazed.

Solid-state drives are three to four times faster than mechanical drives when reading or writing large files, and hundreds of times faster for the small random read and write operations your computer makes most during normal use. Since SSDs don't have any moving parts, they use less power, put out less heat, and don't vibrate. The one downside is that they're more expensive than traditional hard drives, but that price gap is dropping fast; you can get a great SSD for $.36/gigabyte.

You should get an SSD like the 500GB Samsung 850 EVO if you have a laptop or desktop that boots from a mechanical hard drive or a cramped, outdated SSD. It's also a good way to save money on a new laptop. You can usually save several hundred dollars by buying a laptop configured with a mechanical hard drive or small SSD and replacing or augmenting it with a high-capacity SSD.

Most people should get the highest-capacity SSD they can afford. Right now 500GB is the sweet spot. You can get a great 500GB SSD for under $200, and it will have enough room for everything on your computer unless you store a lot of high-res photos or movies or play a lot of games. One-terabyte SSDs are around $375; that's also a great deal if you can swing it.

Because much of an SSD’s speed advantage comes from parallelization, if your drive has fewer modules than your controller can write to at once, it won’t be as fast as it could be. In this generation of SSD controllers, 500GB and 1TB SSDs tend to have faster sequential write speeds than lower-capacity drives, and they're often cheaper per gigabyte. Lower-capacity 850 EVOs mostly escape this write-speed limitation thanks to their TurboWrite feature—which lets them emulate SLC-style writes in some blocks for fast write buffering—but higher-capacity versions are still faster in heavy workloads.

Once you're using the full capacity of your SSD controller, all SATA SSDs are limited by the 6Gbps data rate on the interface, so there's no practical speed difference between most good SATA SSDs. If your computer already has a SATA III SSD as its main drive, the only reason to get a different SSD is if you run out of room on the first one.

Our pick: 500GB Samsung 850 EVO

The 500GB Samsung 850 EVO is the best SSD for most people because it's astonishingly cheap and incredibly fast. The 500GB version is usually around $190. That's about $10-15 more expensive than the cheapest 500GB SSDs, but the Samsung is slightly faster, has a longer warranty, and comes with better software. This balance of features and price is what makes it the best choice for most people.

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The best SSD vendors make at least their own flash memory, but only Samsung manufactures 100 percent of the parts in its SSDs, from controller to firmware to NAND. Because it uses Samsung's new larger-scale 3D TLC V-NAND, it avoids the write-endurance problems of small-scale NAND. The 500GB version has a write endurance rating of 150TB of writes, double the rating of most other drives in its price range. In real life, all SSDs should easily write many times that, and you'll never come close to writing that much to your SSD unless you're a video editor or high-res 3D modeler or an enterprise server (we don't judge). It’s almost impossible to wear out an SSD before the drive itself is obsolete.

The 850 EVO comes with data migration software (Windows-only; Mac users can use the built-in Disk Utility and Linux users can use something like CloneZilla), so it's easy to move your operating system and files from your old drive to the Samsung. It also comes with Samsung's Magician toolbox for checking drive heath, updating firmware, and performing other maintenance, but that's less of a distinguishing factor than it used to be.

It has hardware support for full-disk encryption (which some companies require) and a five-year warranty—two years longer than the Crucial BX100. The 850 EVO also supports Samsung's RAPID caching software, which lets you use up to 4GB of your RAM as a write cache for your drive, making it even faster. Unfortunately, that feature is Windows-only.

The 850 EVO gets exceptional reviews; AnandTech, Tech Report, CNET, PCWorld, and others all really like it. The only real flaw with the 850 EVO is that it was too expensive when launched, but the street price has come down fast.

Just as good, fewer frills

If the 500GB Samsung 850 EVO is sold out or costs more than $210, get the $180 500GB Crucial BX100 instead. It's consistently one of the cheapest 500GB SSDs on the market, but it's also one of the fastest. Like the Samsung 850 EVO, it comes from a reliable company that makes its own NAND (Crucial is one of Micron's consumer-facing brands), though not its own controller.

The BX100 is one of two drives Crucial has released to replace its MX100, our previous top pick. The BX100 is the stripped-down budget model, with a Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller and 16nm Micron MLC NAND. Like the MX100, it has a three-year warranty and is rated for 72TB of writes; unlike the MX100 and MX200, it doesn't come with TCG/Opal full-disk encryption support or a license of Acronis TrueImage HD, so you'll need to use your own cloning software. It does come with Crucial's new Storage Executive software, which does most of the same basic drive-maintenance stuff as Samsung's Magician.

AnandTech's Kristian Vättö performs extensive power-use benchmarks on the drives he tests, and his tests show that the BX100 is much more power-efficient than the 850 EVO, so he recommends it over the Samsung drive for laptops. However, the difference in power draw for normal laptop use is only around 0.1Whr. For most laptops, that's only a few minutes' difference, especially for laptops that are older and less power-efficient to start with.

The BX100 is all the drive most people need, since outside of enterprise use, full-disk encryption is still uncommon, and free drive-cloning software is easy to find. It was almost our top pick, and I'd buy it for my own computer.

The only real problem with it is Samsung's aggressive pricing: while the 850 EVO is within $10 or $20 of the BX100's price, it's worth the extra cost for the Samsung's longer warranty, slightly better speed, higher write endurance rating, and RAPID support.

The best, but overkill for most

Most people don't need an SSD faster than the Samsung 850 EVO or Crucial BX100. Because they're so cheap and so close to the performance limit of their interface, it's not worth paying a lot more for a little bit more performance.

However, if you edit a lot of video or RAW photos or you do 3D modeling and you want the best SATA SSD you can get, buy the Samsung 850 Pro. The 512GB version costs $290. It has the same write endurance rating as the 850 EVO and access to the same great software, but it's a bit faster and has a ten-year warranty. However, the few people who need more speed than they can get from the 850 EVO are better off with a PCIe SSD.

The 850 Evo Pro is more expensive, but it comes with a ten-year warranty.

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Other form factors

The three drives we recommended are all in the 2.5-inch SATA form factor; they have the same physical dimensions as the hard drives used by most laptops that aren't ultrabooks. Ultrabooks and some newer computers use different form factors, like mSATA and M.2. You can use Crucial's upgrade advisor to find which form factor your laptop uses. M.2 drives are more complicated; the best way to find your form factor is this list. Once you know your form factor, try to get an SSD from Samsung, Crucial, Intel, or Plextor in that form factor. The Samsung 850 EVO comes in mSATA and (some) M.2 varieties, but Crucial's MX200 is often cheaper.

For Macs

If you have a MacBook Air from before mid-2013 or a pre-Retina MacBook Pro, you can update the SSD, but you'll need to find one that's made specifically for your model. OWC is your best bet. If you have a more recent Air or Retina MacBook Pro, you still have a blazing-fast SSD, you're just stuck at whatever capacity you bought. Those SSDs use proprietary PCIe form factors, and though they're technically replaceable, nobody makes replacement SSDs for them.

You should know that Apple doesn’t support TRIM (an operating-system-level garbage collection command) on third-party SSDs. It was possible to work around this limitation in previous versions of OS X, but you can’t do it in Yosemite without opening up a security hole. If your SSD’s controller has good onboard garbage collection algorithms, you should be fine even without TRIM. OWC, which makes SSDs for various Mac computers, says its drives (which are based on the aging SandForce SF-2281 processor) don’t need TRIM. Crucial’s drives have active garbage collection, though you’ll have to trigger it manually by booting to the Startup Manager and leaving it there every once in a while.

Wrapping it up

There are many great SSDs out there, and until we move away from SATA, the only real differences are in endurance, consistency, price, and software, not speed. There are many drives that are almost as good as our pick, and some that are cheaper—you can see discussion of other drives in our full-length version of this guide. But for most people, the Samsung 850 EVO is the best combination of price and performance.